The Auction Expert Called It a Cheap Replica — The Man Who Built It Was Sitting in Row Three D

October 8th, 2019. London, Chisik. The Westborne Rooms had been conducting specialist auctions since 1923. The building itself was a converted Victorian meeting hall on Devincure Road. High ceilings, original plaster work, the kind of room that had been filled with many things over a century, and had retained in its walls and its proportions a faint impression of all of them.

For the past 30 years, it had been one of the leading venues in London for vintage musical instrument sales. Guitars, amplifiers, keyboards, memorabilia, the accumulated material evidence of popular music’s history passing through the room in waves twice a year in October and April. The October sale drew specialists from across Europe and collectors from further still.

The chairs filled from the front, the serious biders taking the closer rows, the observers and the uncertain filling toward the back. By 10:30, when the room was settling toward the 11:00 start, there were perhaps 90 people in the seats and another 20 standing along the walls.

The catalog for this sale ran to 62 lots. The headline pieces were a 1958 Flying V in near original condition, a stage used Rickenbacker 401 bass with documentation, and listed as lot 31 with an estimate of 8 to 12,000, a vintage Teleer with non-standard modifications and incomplete provenence. The catalog note had been written with the careful language of a specialist who did not want to oversell.

The guitar may be of interest to collectors of British rock memorabilia from the 1960s, though verification of the claimed providence has not been possible within the time frame of this sale. If stories like this, stories about what gets called a replica before anyone has looked at it properly, stay with you, please subscribe and turn on notifications.

We find these moments so they are never forgotten. Edward Merchant was 49, the Westborne’s head of musical instruments, and had been in this profession since leaving the Cortal Institute in 1995 with a master’s in art history and a sudden understanding that the things he was most interested in were not paintings.

He was good at his work, meticulous, well-connected, with the particular combination of technical knowledge and market intuition that the best auction specialists develop over many years of handling significant objects. He wore a dark suit with a white shirt and the expression of someone who has been in this room many times and knows what to expect from it.

He stood at the podium on the raised platform and waited for the room to settle. What Edward Marchin did not have and had never had was the instinct that comes from having actually played the things he assessed. He knew instruments from the outside their specifications, their market histories, their documentation requirements.

He had never sat down with a guitar and played it. He had never understood from the inside what a musician’s hands leave behind on an instrument over years of use. This is not a disqualifying gap in most contexts. In one context, on the morning of October 8th, it would matter. Raymond Baxter was 68 years old and had worked for 31 years in a car components factory in Coventry before taking early retirement in 2012.

He was not a wealthy man. He was not a collector in any formal sense. But he had loved music all his life in the way of someone who had grown up with it in the house. had bought records every week until streaming made records obsolete and had held in his garage in Coventry for 47 years. A guitar he had bought in 1972 from a market stall in Hillfields for6.

The man at the stall had said it was old and it was electric and it needed work. Raymond had paid6 because he had always wanted to learn to play and had not learned and the guitar had gone into a case in the garage and the case had stayed there for 47 years while Raymond’s life happened around it.

But Raymond was not stupid. And in 2015, when his daughter had come to visit and looked at the guitar and taken a photograph and posted it on a music forum, someone had replied within 40 minutes saying that the modifications on the neck pickup and the specific wiring pattern visible through the output jack were consistent with documented work done by one person to one guitar in 1963.

Raymond had not rushed to sell it. He had thought about it for 4 years. His wife had died in 2017. The house was too large now and the garage contained things that he had been meaning to sort through for a long time. He had come to the Westborne with the guitar in October 2019 because he was 68 years old and he wanted to know before something happened to him what the thing he had bought for six pounds in a market in Hillfields actually was.

He was sitting in row four, nearest the aisle, with the guitar case on the floor beside his feet. He was wearing his good trousers and a jacket he had bought for his daughter’s wedding in 2009, which still fit. He was holding the catalog with both hands and looking at the platform where lot 31 had been placed on the display stand under the specialist lighting.

Have you ever sat in a room holding something you believed in that nobody else could see the value of yet? Tell me in the comments. I need to know I’m not the only one who has felt that particular specific patience. The man in row three, one row in front of Raymond, three seats along, had come in quietly at 10:40 and sat down and opened his catalog and not made any particular impression on anyone nearby.

He was older, mid70s, with long silver white hair and a dark coat. The woman in row three who had taken the aisle seat had glanced at him when he sat down and then returned to her own catalog. He had the reading glasses on to look at the lot descriptions, and his silver rings caught the light from the overhead spots when he turned a page.

He sat with the patience of someone who is comfortable waiting. He had been looking at lot 31’s entry in the catalog for a while. The sale began at 11. Lots 1 through 30 moved with the rhythm of a well-run auction. The opening bids, the increments, the hammer, the next lot. Edward Merchant moved the room through each piece with professional ease, pausing to answer questions, adding detail when it was useful, guiding the bidding with the particular authority of someone who knows the value of everything in the room and knows that he knows it. Lot 31 was placed on the stand by the room assistant at 1217. It was a teleer body shape, single cutaway. The original sunburst finish largely obscured by a layer of black paint that had been applied over it crudely by the hand of someone who wanted to change the look of the

instrument rather than by any factory process. The original neck had been replaced or heavily modified. The headstock showed clear evidence of hand shaping. The tuning machines were non-standard for the period. The neck pickup had been removed and a different unit fitted. the routing visible around the edges.

The scratch plate had been replaced with a hand cut piece that didn’t quite align with the existing holes. The output jack was in a non-standard position. The whole instrument had the look of something that had been extensively worked over by someone who knew exactly what they were doing and had no interest in preserving the guitar’s original specifications.

Edward Merchant lifted it from the stand and turned it in the specialist lighting. He looked at the body. He looked at the neck. He looked at the headstock. Ladies and gentlemen, lot 31, he said into the microphone. We have here a teleer body instrument period unclear with non-standard modifications throughout.

The catalog note references a claimed providence involving a notable British rock musician of the 1960s. I have to be transparent with you about the basis for that claim. He turned the guitar again. The modifications visible on this instrument are not consistent with factory production from any period. the neck pickup replacement, the hand cut scratch plate, the headstock reshaping.

These are not modifications that a responsible collector or restorer would make to an original instrument. The paintwork over the original finish is particularly difficult to explain in the context of a genuine example. He paused. I have consulted with two colleagues on this lot and our conclusion is that this instrument is almost certainly a replica or a heavily composite piece possibly built around some original components but not constituting a genuine period example.

There is no verifiable paper provenence. The estimate reflects this assessment. He set the guitar back on the stand. Subscribe and turn on notifications if you’re staying for what happens next. This is exactly the kind of story this channel makes. In row four, Raymond Baxter’s hands tightened on the catalog.

He had expected something like this. He had been expecting it for 4 years. He opened his mouth. “Excuse me,” he said, not loudly, but the room was quiet. Edward looked toward the voice. Yes, my father bought that guitar in 1972 from a man who worked as a I understand, Edward said, with the practice patience of someone who has heard provenence stories before and knows which ones are verifiable and which ones are family mythology.

and I appreciate you sharing that, but I’m afraid that without documentation, receipts, photographs, written correspondence, we’re not in a position to represent the instrument as anything other than what the physical evidence suggests. Raymond looked at the guitar on the stand. He had carried it on the train from Coventry.

He had sat in this chair for 2 hours. His wife would have known what to say next. He did not. Can you feel what Raymond was feeling in that moment? The particular helplessness of knowing something true that you cannot make legible to the person who needs to hear it. Tell me in the comments. The man in row three had been very still since the guitar was placed on the stand.

When Raymon’s exchange with Edward ended, he sat for a moment. Then he put his catalog on the empty seat beside him. Then his hand went up. Edward looked toward the raised hand. The man in row three. Yes, I’d like to look at the instrument, the man said. His voice was quiet. Not a question, a statement. Edward paused.

This was not standard procedure. I’m afraid we don’t. I’d like to look at it, the man said again. in exactly the same tone, the same quiet, the same absolute patience, the same quality of a sentence that will simply be repeated until it is accommodated. Something in the room shifted. The woman beside him had been looking at her phone. She had looked up when he spoke.

She was looking at him now with the specific expression of someone who has recently understood something. The room assistant looked at Edward. Edward looked at the man in row three. He saw an elderly man’s silver white hair, dark coat, rings. Nothing specific. A serious collector perhaps. Someone of standing.

Of course, Edward said, “Would you come up?” The man stood. He walked from row three to the platform steps. He walked up the steps. He reached the stand. He picked up the guitar. The room was quiet in the way. A room is quiet when it is watching something. He turned the guitar to the body.

He looked at the black paintwork. He ran his thumb along the edge of the body near the lower bout. He turned it over and looked at the back. He looked at the neck. He looked at the headstock. He looked at the neck pickup cavity, the routing around the replacement pickup. He looked at the output jack in its non-standard position.

Then he said to no one in particular, “Could I borrow a torch?” The room assistant produced a small lead torch from the equipment table. The man took it, held the guitar at an angle, and directed the beam into the gap between the scratch plate and the body. The slim line where the hand cut plate didn’t quite align with the original holes.

He looked at this gap for a long time. He lowered the torch. He looked at Edward Merchant. The scratch plate is hand cut. He said, “You identified that correctly. It was cut to accommodate a different pickup routing than the original. The routing was done with a specific hand router by one person in a specific sequence.” He paused.

Inside the body cavity, the routing leaves a mark, a particular arc at the bottom of the cut that is identical on every guitar I modified myself during this period. because I held the router at the same angle every time. Because I was left-handed and held it differently from most people, he looked at the guitar in his hands. I made that mark.

The room was silent. I modified this guitar in 1963. He said, “I played it from 1963 to 1967. I gave it to a roadie named Tom Baxter when I changed my setup before the first Zeppelin sessions. His name is on a piece of paper in the guitar’s body that I put there at the time in the event that this conversation ever became necessary.

He looked at Edward Merchant. Edward Merchant looked at him. Someone in the back row said very quietly, “Oh my god.” The woman who had been looking at her phone leaned across to the person beside her and held the screen out. The person looked at the screen and looked at the man on the platform and looked at the screen.

Raymond Baxter in row four was looking at the man on the platform. The man who had been sitting one row ahead in three seats along, the man he had not looked at. Jimmy Page set the guitar back on the display stand with the same care he had used when picking it up. He looked at Edward Marchant and the look contained everything that needed to be communicated and nothing extra.

There is a piece of paper inside the body. He said behind the rear pickup cavity. You’ll need a thin mirror or a camera. Tom Baxter’s name is on it. This is Tom Baxter’s guitar. He stepped off the platform. He walked back to row three. Raymond was on his feet before he reached his seat. He couldn’t speak.

He had driven from Coventry. He had sat in the car at a service station on the M40 and eaten a sandwich and thought about his wife who had told him in 2015 that the guitar was something and that he should find out what she had always known. He had taken four more years. He stood in the aisle and Jimmy Paige came back from the platform and stopped in front of him. Paige looked at Raymond.

Your father kept it in good condition, he said. Considering what I did to it, that’s a significant achievement. Raymond made a sound that was not a laugh, but was adjacent to one. Paige reached into his coat pocket and produced a small card. He held it out to Raymond. When you’re ready to sell it properly, and there’s no hurry, call this number.

They’ll represent you correctly. Raymond took the card. Paige sat back down in row three. The Westborne rooms took 20 minutes to reconstitute itself. There were phone calls. There were conversations at the edges of the room. Edward Merchant stood at the podium and said a number of professional sentences about the process of lot revision and reserve prices and catalog updates.

The piece of paper was retrieved from inside the guitar body by a specialist with a fiber optic camera and confirmed as a piece of plain paper with a name written on it in blue ink and a date. November 14th, 1967. Tom Baxter. Lot 31 sold at 1:40 in the afternoon for £385,000. Raymond sat in his seat through the whole of it. He did not bid.

He watched the number go up increment by increment. The way that numbers go up when a room full of people who have understood something all understand it at the same time. When the hammer came down, he sat still for a while and then he called his daughter. She answered on the third ring.

Dad, are you okay? Raymond looked at the platform where the guitar had been. Do you remember that guitar in the garage? Pause. The one I told you not to sell?” “Yes, I didn’t sell it,” Raymond said. “Not exactly,” he paused. “It went to the right place.” He didn’t explain further. He didn’t need to. Some things arrive at their proper home by roots you couldn’t have planned in rooms you didn’t expect after 47 years in a garage in Coventry.

This was one of those things. On this channel, we make videos to pass on the beautiful things that have moved through the hands of the people who shaped music because those things deserve to be remembered. If you’re not already with us, please subscribe and turn on notifications. Every story we find is a story worth keeping.

Let’s close with something Jimmy Page has said about the instruments he made his own. I modified those guitars because I could hear what they needed to be. When you put your hands on something long enough, you leave a mark. That’s not damage. That’s history. If there is an object you have kept for years without knowing its full story and then found out, tell me about it in the comments.

I read every single one, and I’ll see you in the next story.